Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

nators of Jews. But Derrida did exactly this. According to Der- rida, it was not de Man but rather American journalists who had ...

make-or-break example, exhibit A for the prosecution: de Man’s essay “The Jews in Contemporary Literature” (Le Soir, March 4 , 1 ...

defends the Jews, striking out against a “‘myth’... an ‘error’ and a ‘very widespread opinion’”: namely, anti-Semitism. The obvi ...

again to the conclusion of “The Jews in Contemporary Lit- erature,” Derrida writes the following astounding words: “Without want ...

action when she told him her choice of subject.) There were, Kaplan emphasizes, “a number of approaches to the anti- semitic gen ...

( 147 ). Paul de Man, of course,didend his association with Le Soir.And that fact, Derrida muses, suggests that Le Soir’s edi- t ...

sponding to rumors about him that de Man wrote to Poggioli in 1955 , during his Harvard years. In fact, Poggioli kept the letter ...

“prefer[s]” de Man’s decision not to confess, Derrida applauds de Man for the very concealment that was most troubling to his re ...

show, first, how rhetorical tropes “seem to make... responsi- bility impossible” but in fact “give it a chance.” Derrida knows e ...

and snaking into pages-long footnotes, Derrida’s denuncia- tions become more and more bitter. As for the Nation’s piece on de Ma ...

degger book has a background in another scandal, this time concerning not a beloved friend but one of Derrida’s idolized philoso ...

ized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps.” Genocide and com ...

Derrida’s remarks in “Philosophers’ Hell,” the Nouvel observateurinterview that he gave shortly after the publication of his boo ...

Derrida suggests, he was (really or covertly) criticizing Nazism, which is also a philosophy of the human, of “spirit.” Most fas ...

V Politics, Marx, Judaism n the 1990 s, as he neared the close of his life and his aca- demic career, Derrida again sought an ar ...

gave a lecture at Cornell called “The Politics of Friendship”; he repeated it in December at a meeting of the American Philo- so ...

Man, turning him into an enemy of Nazi anti-Semitism; and even Heidegger was said by Derrida to be questioning Nazism. Derrida m ...

the experience in “Circumfession,” the rather cagey autobio- graphical essay he published in 1992. Derrida relates that when he ...

Derrida’s guidance for the European future, as delivered in Turin, seems understated, even banal. “On the one hand,” he re- mark ...

proclaimed in his speech that, despite appearances to the contrary, deconstruction had always been fundamentally con- cerned wit ...